When I woke up the next morning, my eyes were so puffy, they were practically swollen shut. I splashed cold water on my face, but it didn’t really help. I brushed my teeth. And then I went back to bed. I’d wake up and hear people moving out of the dorms, and then I’d just fall back to sleep. I should have been packing, but all I wanted to do was sleep. I slept all day. I woke up again when it was dark out, and I didn’t turn on the lights. I just lay in bed until I fell asleep again.
It was late afternoon the next day when I finally got up. When I say “got up,” I mean “sat up.” I finally sat up in my bed. I was thirsty. I felt wrung dry from all the crying. This propelled me to actually get out of bed and walk the five feet over to the mini fridge and take one of the bottled waters Jillian had left behind.
Looking across the room at her empty bed and empty walls made me feel even more depressed. Last night I wanted to be alone. Today I thought I would go out of my mind if I didn’t talk to another person.
I went down the hall to Anika’s room. The first thing she said when she saw me was, “What’s wrong?”
I sat on her bed and hugged her pillow to my chest. I had come to her wanting to talk, wanting to get it out, but now it was hard to say the words. I felt ashamed. Of him and for him. All my friends loved Jeremiah. They thought he was practically perfect. I knew that as soon as I told Anika, all of that would be gone. This would be real. For some reason, I still wanted to protect him.
“Iz, what happened?”
I’d really thought I was done crying, but a few tears leaked out anyway. I went ahead and said it. “Jeremiah cheated on me.”
Anika sank onto the bed. “Shut the front door,” she breathed. “When? With who?”
“With Lacey Barone, that girl in his sister sorority. During spring break. When we were broken up.”
She nodded, taking this in.
“I’m so mad at him,” I said. “For hooking up with another girl and then not telling me all this time. Not telling is the same as lying. I feel so stupid.”
Anika handed me the box of tissues on her desk. “Girl, you let yourself feel whatever you need to feel,” she said.
I blew my nose. “I feel… like maybe I don’t know him like I thought I did. I feel like I can’t trust him ever again.”
“Keeping a secret like that from the person you love is probably the worst part,” Anika said.
“You don’t think the actual cheating is the worst part?”
“No. I mean, yeah, that is horrible. But he should have just told you. It was turning it into a secret that gave it power.”
I was silent. I had a secret too. I hadn’t told anyone, not even Anika or Taylor. I had told myself that it was because it wasn’t important, and then I had put it out of my mind.
The past couple of years, I sometimes pulled out a memory I had of Conrad and looked at it, admired it, sort of in the same way I looked at my old shell collection. There was pleasure in just touching each shell, the ridges, the cool smoothness. Even after Jeremiah and I started dating, every once in a while, sitting in class or waiting for the bus or trying to fall asleep, I would pull out an old memory. The first time I ever beat him in a swimming race. The time he taught me how to dance. The way he used to wet down his hair in the mornings.
But there was one memory in particular, one I didn’t let myself touch. It wasn’t allowed.
